1 ties in nicely with something I read about e.e. cummings' personal life this weekend:

[The Dial publisher Scofield] Thayer married Elaine Orr on 21 June 1916. He commissioned his friend E. E. Cummings to write his poem "Epithalamion" as a wedding present. The marriage did not last long, however, as by 1919 Elaine was having an affair with Cummings, even giving birth to a daughter, Nancy, by Cummings in December of that year.

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in
my heart)i am never without it(anywhere
i go you go,my dear; and whatever is done
by only me is your doing,my darling)
i fear
no fate(for you are my fate,my sweet)i want
no world(for beautiful you are my world,my true)
and it's you are whatever a moon has always meant
and whatever a sun will always sing is you

it's ability to mean so much to one person, when to another person it seems so lame.

i mean, i'm one of your biggest fans, lb, but eec's use of endearments in their is so intrusive and artificial.

it sounds like the standard sit-com gag where a couple are getting into a fight, and the more tense and p.o.'d at each other they get, the more they start their sentences and clause with "honey" and "dear".

still, there's a neat coincidence in the fact that i would never say that stuff to will, and will would never sleep with me anyhow.

When my friends starting hitting their early 30s, a few of them got divorced, and I realized what a great pool "recently divorced women" is to draw from if you were interested in low commitment sex. My friends all had the looks and sex drives of young people, but no interest at all in ever getting entangled in a relationship ever again.

I realized what a great pool "recently divorced women" is to draw from if you were interested in low commitment sex. My friends all had the looks and sex drives of young people, but no interest at all in ever getting entangled in a relationship ever again.

Isnt that the truth!

Kid Bitzer:

I would definitely sleep with you! But, not that other Kid Bitzer who comments on Tuesdays and Thursdays.

19: What's wrong with having low-committment sex with someone who wants the sex and doesn't want the committment? I could see it being depressing, and involving spending a fair amount of time with sad people, but I'm not getting the unethical bit.

22: To be fair, it's not hard to believe that d^2's personal experience has led him to believe that it's not possible for women to like sex for its own sake. And we're all trapped by our own experiences.

24, 25: Oh, sure. I thought the idea was that the defined population tended to be actively seeking low-committment sex, so not so much with the predation. More with the strategic placement of oneself as a harmless, big-eyed, bunnyrabbit to be predated upon in a mutually enjoyable manner.

To get back to the original post, I think taking .5+7 to define the range of people you can date, as opposed to hook up with, is pretty optimistic. Not many thirty year-olds will want to marry someone 46, even if they do want to sleep with them.

From a geezer- I was single until my late-30s. I didn't find the pool to shrink much and had some decent, relatively long-term relationships- which is to say there were definitely less interested in casual relationships (not that there's anything wrong with that). And I'm not even good-looking or important. So no worries for y'all.

Half+seven is a stupid, stupid rule. The only thing it does is, under the assumption that the older partner is male, scale out a woman's fertile years so that a man of almost any age is entitled to marry a pre-menopausal woman. That's all it does.

It just doesn't work as any sort of modern-era rule of thumb for what looks unseemly -- everyone should date whoever they want, assuming there's nothing else wrong about it, but using a rule of thumb like that doesn't get you anywhere. (I mean, xkcd is forgiven because (a) genius, and (b) you need a formula to make the joke work, but people taking the formula seriously are being weird.)

When my love swears that she is made of truth,
I do believe her though I know she lies,
That she might think me some untutored youth,
Unlearnèd in the world's false subtleties.
Thus vainly thinking that she thinks me young,
Although she knows my days are past the best,
Simply I credit her false-speaking tongue:
On both sides thus is simple truth suppressed.
But wherefore says she not she is unjust?
And wherefore say not I that I am old?
O love's best habit is in seeming trust,
And age in love loves not to have years told.
Therefore I lie with her, and she with me,
And in our faults by lies we flattered be.

38--
agreed.
what you said about premenopausal, but also--it has the effect of guaranteeing that no one sleeps with early teens except other early teens, which is better than the alternatives.
still, stupid as a serious rule.
i guess that's why i have always assume it is purely jocular.
(no one could actually *mean* that, right?)

Half plus seven doesn't have to be gender specific, and it offers a pleasantly wide range if you can put yourself on either side of the equation. E.g. at 30, the range is 22 to 47; at 40, it's 27 to 66.

I love E. E. Cummings, though mostly not for his love poems -- more for his death poems. Let me urge you, however, regardless of your feelings about Cummings' poetry, to read The Enormous Room, his memoir about his time in prison in France during WWI. It's vivid, funny, terrible, and humane.

61: Sure, but it doesn't actually describe anything corresponding to real social mores -- either in existence or that anyone sane would advocate. Who out there would say that the line between creepy and non-creepy for who a forty-year-old can date is at 27? If 27 doesn't bother you, 25 wouldn't. Likewise, someone who's happy with a forty year old dating a 66 year old isn't going to be bothered if the forty year old is thirtynine instead.

No, I'm saying that that formula isn't a ballpark-sensible method of line-drawing. People who get tense about age-differences are going to get tense well within its limits; people who don't get tense aren't going to give a damn.

And anyway, there are surely tons of examples of laws that exist largely because having one line drawn somewhere, even if it doesn't reflect the true diversity of experience, is better than throwing up one's hands and saying "everything must be decided on a case by case basis."

69: Sure, where you need to draw a line, but this is not such a case. What, we're going to prohibit 25-40 marriages? I don't think so. It's a silly formula: it includes a whole lot of pairings that look creepy, if you're being judgmental like that, and the ones it excludes aren't any creepier than the ones it includes.

Eh. I think it's a bad rule, because if you're going to be judgmental about age differences at all, it vastly understates the point at which looking askance should begin. (I can sympathize with the position that no one should be looking askance at anyone else's relationships, but a rule that says 60-38 is within a limit where no one should consider it problematic, even if we generally worry about such things, is screwy.)

71: It's a silly formula: it includes a whole lot of pairings that look creepy, if you're being judgmental like that, and the ones it excludes aren't any creepier than the ones it includes.

"aren't any creepier than" s/b "are only slightly more creepy than." We make judgments about shades of gray all the time, and this seems as appropriate a subject for them as any, especially considering that it's not a weighty matter like the law. Also, I was going to say what kid bitzer said in 48 about it mattering on the teen/young adult side of things, but he said it first. A 40-year-old dating a 26-year-old might be fine, but a 22-year-old dating a 17-year-old is very likely not a healthy relationship, or at least, a sign of something unhealthy about one of them.

A propos of nothing, I'm a 25-year-old with a moribund dating life, and posts and comment threads about relationships (happy/normal/long-term relationships) sometimes depress the hell out of me. Why hasn't Emerson commented here yet?

I think a better rule is "Date who you like" modified by "People who deliberately prey on a partner's youth and inexperience suck" and "People in relationships predicated on an exchange of sexual attractiveness for money and similar tangible goods are skeevy." Harold and Maude can go right on being happy together.

Rules are silly, and all kinds of different kinds of compatibilities are possible. In general, the only drawback I found from dating much older guys was that, if when I was 17 and he was 28, or when I was 24 and he was 43, we were compatible in temperament, maturity, and wisdom, it wasn't long before I realized that I felt I had so far to go, but that he was already much more fixed. I've changed remarkably over the past 10 years, and had I tried to stay with one of them, I think I'd resent them for holding me back. But in the short term, those relationships were very good for me. Drove my parents nuts, of course.

A propos of nothing, I'm a 25-year-old with a moribund dating life, and posts and comment threads about relationships (happy/normal/long-term relationships) sometimes depress the hell out of me. Why hasn't Emerson commented here yet?

It's funny that this thread popped up today. Just this weekend, Rory (daughter, age 8) informed me that it is Wrong to date where there is a 15 year age difference. (Raised in the context of why it's not okay for me to observe that Zac Ephron is a cutie. If you don't know who Zac Ephron is, you probably also don't have an inane soundtrack marketed to the tween demographic lodged in your head.)

Interesting, too, as Rory tells me all the time she wants to take a trip to New York. I've never been, and I'm not at all sure what she knows or thinks she knows about it, other than to have proclaimed, at age 4 or so that the Yankees are ruining baseball. But if we do someday make it to your town, I'm sure Rory would love the playdate, too.

to my mind, dating the negatively aged is only creepier when done by cent-and-a-half-enarians.

or the undead. you want to go out to a bar and see some undead geezer dating a chick who is only, say, -17 years old? it's seriously distasteful, i'm telling you.

and that's why we *need* these rules.

i know, lb and awb are going all mushy and saying lighten up man if it feels good do it, and i'm saying: don't listen to them. that sort of stuff will result in mummies from the tomb dating fetuses from the future, and you just have to draw a line in the sand against that kind of thing.

71. Absolutely. For example, my parents 38/25 contrived not to be creepy, because they shared most of their outlooks and interests.

OTOH, this is mega-creepy, because of the nature of the fantasy and the fantasist:

Ancient Person, for whom I
All the flattering youth defy,
Long be it e'er thou grow old,
Aching, shaking, crazy cold;
But still continue as thou art,
Ancient Person of my heart.

On thy withered lips and dry,
Which like barren furrows lie,
Brooding kisses I will pour,
Shall thy youthful heart restore,
Such kind show'rs in autumn fall,
And a second spring recall;
Nor from thee will ever part,
Ancient Person of my heart.

Thy nobler parts, which but to name
In our sex would be counted shame,
By ages frozen grasp possest,
From their ice shall be released,
And, soothed by my reviving hand,
In former warmth and vigour stand.
All a lover's wish can reach,
For thy joy my love shall teach;
And for thy pleasure shall improve
All that art can add to love.
Yet still I love thee without art,
Ancient Person of my heart.

I'm more or less in line with the principles in 88 (I think about these issues wearing my "dad" hat, not my "potential partner" hat) but I have to say that I'd be less than thrilled at the prospect of meeting a 43 year old with the maturity of a 24 year old. Or a 28 year old with the maturity of a 17 year old.

107--
esther and jarndyce in the growlery, yeah.
but it's not just bleak house, by any means. it's already there in copperfield. his sainted teacher, with reverend locks, is hitched with a young babe who is suspected of getting it on with a contemporaneous buck.
plus, that's where the original 'child-bride' comes from (dora?)

I dated a guy in college who was 10 years my senior. I learned this only after the first few dates, and my initial reactions was, "So what? Age is just a number." Then it struck me that I'd graduate before him, that he still hadn't declared a major, and that something just seemed wrong to me about a guy pushing 30 who could still blend so easily with the 19 year olds.

On the flip side, I know a 60 year old woman who's been very happily married to a 39 year old guy for the last 15 years. So, maybe age is just a number after all.

Then it struck me that I'd graduate before him, that he still hadn't declared a major, and that something just seemed wrong to me about a guy pushing 30 who could still blend so easily with the 19 year olds.

On the flip side, I know a 60 year old woman who's been very happily married to a 39 year old guy for the last 15 years. So, maybe age is just a number after all.

I knew a 28 year old man who married a woman of 50+ (his landlady, not that it matters a damn) and the local paper thought it wise to make it the main headline on the front page. Not just a number if it's your life.